Sir Richard Rodney Bennett

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Richard Rodney Bennett at the piano in 1975Vincent McEvoy/Redferns/Getty Images

Last updated at 12:01AM, December 27 2012

Versatile composer and pianist whose work spanned film and TV scores to the avante garde

Few contemporary British composers of the past 50 years have mastered as many
musical worlds and voices as Richard Rodney Bennett. At the outset, in the
1950s, Bennett was Britain’s most precocious practitioner of serial
composition, a pupil and devotee of Pierre Boulez, writing abstruse works to
match. He also flourished from an early age as a composer of cinema
soundtracks, mostly for British films. He wrote music for Peter Sellers
comedies, Hammer horrors, for Murder on the Orient Express and Four
Weddings and a Funeral, among others.